New on the Market - Beverly, Chicago

By By Chicago magazine

Published April 12, 2007

List price: $1.4 million

The Property: Designed in the late 1920s by Scipione Del Campo for John Tiberi (the owner of a cement company), this 12-room brick house on the city’s Far Southwest Side resembles Tiberi’s boyhood home in Italy. While its blond good looks would stand out in any neighborhood, the house literally rises above its neighbors because its basement was built at ground level and then the yard was backfilled up to the house’s first floor.

The interior craftwork elegantly complements the house’s exterior. Most of the doorways are arched, a plaster mantel in the main-floor study is as ornate as anything in a Renaissance chapel, and the passage from the master bedroom to the sitting area is framed by two twisted columns that suggest a Venetian palazzo. The house has four other bedrooms, a sauna and a wine cellar in the basement, and a fountain in the back yard.

The extensive murals and other interior decorations-all meticulously maintained-have not stopped the current owners from treating the house as a home. “We’ve never lived as if this were a museum,” says Mari-Ellyn Morreale, whose family has lived in the house for 21 years after buying the place from Tiberi’s estate. (Her husband, Phillip Morreale, is a doctor at Little Company of Mary Hospital). To make her point, she shows where her three children threw darts, drew on walls, and stowed their sports equipment as they were growing up.

Price Points: The $1.4-million asking price far exceeds Beverly’s record sale of $850,000 (according to records of the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois). Its kitchen and breakfast room (a later addition) are dated and surprisingly modest-but because they share none of the house’s interior detailing, adding a new kitchen would not harm the overall design.